Google's new "rich snippets" penalty: can it hit your site?

Actionable checklist to make sure you're on the safe side.

Urgent: last week Google started issuing a new type of manual penalty — targeting rich snippets considered fake and spam-like. Some webmasters have already received the new type of alert:

Spammy structured markup

Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google's Rich Snippet Quality guidelines.

The update is aimed to target websites that use rich snippets in a black-hat, spammy manner. But the exact factors triggering the new penalty are not yet known.

And as lots of our users send worried emails, asking if their sites can get de-ranked by mistake (because they don't know how to manage rich snippets properly) — we put together this quick check list to make sure your rich snippets are in order.

Read on to get a quick idea of what rich snippets are and how to set them up, or jump straight to the checklist.

What are rich snippets?

Rich Snippets are enhanced displays of web page results, including images and other extra information about the website.

As Google puts it, "rich snippets are designed to summarize the content of a page in a way that makes it even easier for users to understand what the page is about in our search results."

Obviously this extended information is likely to attract attention and stimulate higher click-through rates. Thus if you haven't already heard of rich snippets or incorporated them in your site, you're missing a great chance to attract extra organic traffic.

What data gets into rich snippets?

There are types of rich snippets you can use, depending on the type of your site's content. These types differ for various search engines. Current rich snippets supported by Google are:

How to set rich snippets data for your website?

Rich Snippets are the result of properly implemented structured data markup. By marking up your page data, you show the search engines — and enable them to show users — some of the most important information on your pages.

And here's where it gets a little more complicated — there's no easy on or off button inside your CMS that will implement structured data automatically, so you'll have to apply some tech knowledge and read guidelines for the markup format you prefer:

On the first line, <itemscope itemtype="http://www.data-vocabulary.org/Person"> indicates that the HTML enclosed in the <div> represents a Person. itemscope indicates that the content of the <div>describes an item, and itemtype="http://www.data-vocabulary.org/Person" indicates that the item is a Person. person can be used to represent microformats vcard.

The sample describes properties of the person, such as his name, nickname, and job title. To label person properties, each element containing one of these properties (such as <div> or <span>) is assigned an itemprop attribute indicating a property. For example, <span itemprop="nickname">.

A property can consist of another item (in other words, an item can include other items). For example, the person information above includes an Address (itemtype="http://www.data-vocabulary.org/Address") with the properties locality and region.

In the first line, class="vcard" indicates that the HTML enclosed in the <div>describes contact information, in this case contact information for a Person.

(The microformat used to describe contact information is called hCard and is referred to in HTML as vcard. This isn't a typo.)

The sample describes properties of the Person item, such as a photo, name, title, organization, and address. To label properties about the person described by the vcard, each element containing one of these properties (such as <span> or<div>) is assigned a class attribute indicating a property. The vcard describes Bob's name (fn), his job title (title), and the organization he works for (org).

Properties can contain other properties. In the example above, the property adr describes the address of the person, and includes the subproperties locality, and region).

The example begins with a namespace declaration using xmlns. This indicates the namespace where the vocabulary (a list of entities and their components) is specified. You can use the xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#" namespace declaration any time you are marking up pages for people, review, product, or place data. Be sure to use a trailing slash and # (xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#").

Also on the first line, typeof="v:Person" indicates that the marked-up content represents a Person. The typeof property name is prefixed with v: (typeof="v:Person")

Each property of the person (such as the name and nickname) is labeled usingproperty. The property name is prefixed with v: (<span property="v:nickname">).

To indicate a URL, use rel instead of property, like this: <a href="http://www.example.com" rel="v:url">www.example.com</a>. Be sure to prefix with v. "rel" is used to convey the relationship between two entities—in this case, a Person entity and a webpage entity.

One more thing you have to understand is that implementing structured data doesn't guarantee that your site will get a rich snippet displayed in search results. It just makes rich snippets possible. With the last word still left for Google.

Ok, so here is the actionable checklist to make sure your rich snippets are in order — the easiest ways to validate your structured data markup and the main points to consider.

Tools to use:

1 "Structured Data Dashboard" in Webmaster Tools account

First of all, check out the "Structured Data Dashboard" which you can find at Search Appearance > Structured Data in your Webmaster tools account. There you'll see a list of the structured data types found on your site and any no errors and technical issues related to them.

— Rich snippets markup found on a specific web page
— PageMap data associated with the page
— Meta tags found on the page
— Author information found on the page
— Keys available to use for restricting and sorting/biasing search results
— A preview of how that page might appear in Google search results
— Examples of extracted markup for specific information types.

Faults to avoid:

1 Hidden content

The first no-no for your rich snippets is the content, seen to search engines and hidden from your actual visitors. Even if the data you'd like to be displayed in the rich snippets does not match your design or isn't really needed to your visitors — never use CSS, value-title, display:none or any other means to hide this data, because this is what Google can potentially see as spamming.

2Structured data not matching your pages content

Make sure the info represented in your structured data markup actually matches the page content, the products or events described on it.

Google sees the main function of rich snippets in making it easier to understand, what a page is about. So, rich snippets that are "alien" to your page can be seen as misleading and manipulative.

3Different markup formats within one page

Make sure rich snippets (at least within one page) are built using one specific markup format. Otherwise Google may find it difficult to read your data correctly.

4Incorrect nesting

Some items of you structured data can include other items. For example, a restaurant review might include a Person as the author of a review. In this case, you can convey the relationship between these types of data by nesting Person information (reviewer details) inside that review.

Incorrect nesting is a technical issue that is not directly related to spamming, but makes it difficult for Google to correctly interpret your data and may potentially put you into troubles. You can read Google's guidelines for proper nesting here.

Ok, it's time to look at your site's structured data markup — hope this guide helps you make a better sense of how to check if your rich snippets are in order.

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